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Matt is co-founder of Bitmatica , and on a mission to teach enterprises how to build software products like agile startups.

Driving innovation by asking questions, understanding problems, challenging assumptions, and building solutions that deliver what businesses need, not just what they ask for.

He has over a decade of experience building products in Silicon Valley, including working with dozens of enterprises and startups worldwide to build innovative experiences and capture new markets. Advised, trained, and helped build new digital products for single-founder startups to Fortune 500 companies including Autodesk, Capital One, Maersk, Stanford University, BART, AVG, and dozens more.

How important is environment to innovation potential?

Environment is often one of the biggest drivers of innovation, creating catalysts for collaboration, talent, new ideas, and competition. One of Silicon Valley’s often-praised unique characteristics is its “pay-it-forward” culture, an environment that encourages collaboration and the sharing of ideas, without closely-guarded secrets or a requirement of help in return. In environments that discourage open collaboration, similar challenges often have to be solved simultaneously by different organizations, slowing the progress of the entire ecosystem. Because the value lies in the execution, not the concept, environments that promote the open sharing of ideas often produce far more innovative organizations.

Meanwhile, physically tapping into the environment of both complimentary and competing technology allows organizations to set a benchmark for their products. Being intimately aware of cutting edge technology prevents complacency and a false sense of progress inside organizations that may in fact be potentially years behind their competitors.

Why do you think companies can innovate so much quicker today?

Technology continues to increase the speed of change, and now more than ever before, the rapid sharing of ideas has encouraged many organizations to explore outside of their core business. Software and the Internet in particular have enabled the rapid prototyping and wide distribution of new concepts at only a fraction of the cost, allowing R&D and innovation labs to test hypotheses with minimal risk. Previously, large improvements to business or product required substantial budgets, time, and resources, without insight into their impact for years. Today, customer insights can be gathered within hours, shortening the feedback loop and accelerating innovation.

How can enterprises innovate like startups?

The number one strategy critical to achieving the speed and growth of a startup is consistent, pervasive customer feedback, and the adaptation to that feedback. When ideas come from within, particularly from management, they are often misaligned with the goals of a customer base, slowing adoption and growth. Meanwhile, because startups are obligated by their minimal funding to achieve product market fit as quickly as possible, the successful cases focus relentlessly on the needs of the market, and build to those needs.

What does a company that fosters innovation look like?

To achieve the goal of building a customer-focused organization, enterprises that foster a culture of empathy, shared incentives, and appetite for risk will unlock the key to their innovation potential. Empathetic organizations that try to solve problems, both internally and externally, instead of focusing on individualized achievement, allow businesses to be more cross-functional, and take advantage of the substantial amount of in-house expertise available to execute on new ideas. When management encourages the entire organization to work toward a common goal, without business units competing for resources or recognition, enterprises begin to realize the growth that they did when they were startups originally – focused on a common purpose. And to support this new way of thinking, truly innovative organizations need to enable their employees to take risks and challenge themselves, and reward the effort and the method, not the outcome.

What can our audience expect to take away from your presentation?

As an organization, Bitmatica is very much focused on the “how” of implementing these strategies, and I’ll be talking very concretely about how a startup builds digital products, and how enterprises can change their mindset to innovate faster than they ever thought possible.